SEO, CRO, data and AI. What I learn at work, written down so it lasts.https://www.simonebussoni.it/en-UShttps://www.simonebussoni.it/en/writing/personal-site-built-for-ai/https://www.simonebussoni.it/en/writing/personal-site-built-for-ai/The choices behind this site: entity-first instead of keyword-first, llms.txt, Markdown versions of every page and a single JSON-LD graph. A personal site designed to be understood and cited by AIs, not just indexed by Google.Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT<p><strong>TL;DR</strong></p><p>I rebuilt <a href="http://simonebussoni.it">simonebussoni.it</a> around one question: what does a system — Google or an LLM — need in order to understand who I am and cite me? Answer: a coherent entity (one Person node in the JSON-LD, referenced everywhere via @id), citable content with a TL;DR up top, a curated /llms.txt and a clean Markdown version of every page. No CMS, no tracking before consent, 100 on Lighthouse. Entity-first, not keyword-first.</p> <hr /><p>When I decided to rebuild my personal site, the starting question wasn’t “which keywords do I want to rank for?”. It was another one: <strong>what does a system — Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude — need in order to understand who I am and decide to cite me?</strong></p> <p>That’s a different question, and it leads to different choices. I’ll walk through them here, because this site is its own first case study.</p> <h2>Entity-first, not keyword-first</h2> <p>The SEO I learned in 2008 started from the page: one page, one keyword, one intent. It still works, but it’s half the job. The other half is the <strong>entity</strong>: who you are, what you can do, who you’re connected to, what you’ve verifiably done.</p> <p>Generative engines don’t reason in pages, they reason in entities and relationships. If they don’t know who you are, it doesn’t matter how optimised a single page is: they have no reason to trust you enough to cite you.</p> <h2>One Person node, referenced via @id</h2> <p>Every page emits a JSON-LD graph, but the <code>Person</code> node that describes me is defined <strong>once</strong>, with a stable <code>@id</code>. Every other page — a post, a project page — doesn’t re-declare it: it references it via <code>@id</code>. A crawler aggregating my data finds one consistent “Simone Bussoni”, everywhere. Consistency is trust, and trust is what turns being indexed into being cited.</p> <h2>/llms.txt and the Markdown versions</h2> <p>Two cheap technical details that say a lot: a curated <strong><code>/llms.txt</code></strong> index that explains in three lines who I am and links the key pages, and a clean <strong>Markdown version of every page</strong>, declared in the head with <code>rel=&quot;alternate&quot; type=&quot;text/markdown&quot;</code>. No navigation, no noise: just the text, the way a model likes it. In <code>robots.txt</code> I then explicitly allow GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended. The goal isn’t to defend against AIs — it’s to be cited.</p> <h2>The “boring” choices that make it fast</h2> <p>No database CMS (content is files in the repo), no tracking before consent (Consent Mode v2, default denied), and 100 on Lighthouse as a constraint, not a goal. Speed is part of the message: a site that’s slow on performance isn’t credible when it talks about performance.</p> <p>If the topic interests you, <a href="/en/topics/seo-ai-search/">it’s the heart of my SEO &amp; AI Search pillar</a>.</p> Simone Bussoni